Food challenges are a relatively new thing, but they're getting more popular every day.
Humans aren't meant to consume that much food in a single sitting, and if you've ever thought
it's got to have some adverse effects on the whole body, you're correct.
Watching anyone — professional or amateur — pack away an insane amount of food during
any challenge brings up an important question: where the heck is it all going?
According to Healthline, the average human stomach is 12 inches long, six inches wide
at the widest point, and can stretch to comfortably hold about a quart of food.
That's not much when you're talking about scarfing down dozens of hot dogs for a food
challenge, so how do competitive eaters keep going?
Chronic overeating can stretch a person's stomach to allow them to eat much more, and
when it comes to the professionals, that's exactly what they do.
Take world-famous speed eating champion Matt Stonie.
He's said that his stomach has between a 16- and 20-pound capacity, and just think about
how much that really is.
Competitive eater Michelle Lesco told Women's Health that she trained for events by eating
foods in a quantity that would help stretch her stomach.
That includes things like a gallon of chocolate milk or four liters of soda, chugged in a
matter of minutes.
She went on to say that a properly stretched stomach allows her to shove food into it in
a way she likened to, quote, "pouring sand into a bucket instead of into a deflated balloon."
Developing the ability to eat obscene amounts of food for challenges is also about muscle
control.
According to University of Pennsylvania professor of gastroenterology Dr. David C. Metz, relaxing
the muscles around the stomach is key.
Normally, the muscles around your gut increase the pressure on your stomach as it fills.
That's why you burp and, in extreme cases, might vomit after eating or drinking way too
much — something that happens often during amateur eating competitions.
But in order for competitive eaters to be really successful, they need to relax those
muscles that force the vomiting and nausea reflex in most people.
Other muscles are affected during food challenges, too.
University of Pennsylvania researchers studied just what's going on inside the digestive
tract of eaters in mid-competition.
While most average people will stop when they feel full, those that are really good at it
showed little to no peristalsis — that's the constant movement of the digestive
tract, which moves food down along the line.
They're not quite sure what's going on here, but it seems to suggest that in order to be
really good at food challenges, your body needs to be tricked into never feeling full.
"How are we today?"
"Better."
"Better?"
"Better get a bucket. I'm gonna throw up."
"Ah, Gaston? A bucket for monsieur."
If you've ever sat down to, say, try to finish a table-sized pizza to get your picture on
a wall of fame, there's something working against you: your nervous system.
Specifically, the vagus nerve.
When you eat and eat and eat, your stomach isn't necessarily the one that tells you that
you really need to stop now, thank you very much.
When you're full, that triggers the vagus nerve to send a message to your brain to tell
you to stop.
It's not just a discrete message, either, it's part of what triggers feelings of discomfort,
nausea, and — if you don't listen to it — vomiting.
It's called the satiety reflex, and it's what plays a huge part in food challenge failures.
If you're participating in a food challenge, your brain will probably tell you to stop
pretty quickly.
It's also part of what competitive eaters train themselves to ignore by eating progressively
larger and larger amounts.
But Scientific American says that there may be a way for the every-day competitor to hack
the system.
Researchers say some foods — particularly desserts — override our satiety reflex,
trigger your brain's reward system, and lead to what's called "hedonic hunger,"
or eating just for the sake of eating.
It's why you eat the whole pint of ice cream instead of just a scoop, so if you're looking
for that food challenge to ace, go for something sweet and let your brain work with you, not
against you.
"Humans require ice cream."
"What is this place?"
"Eat the ice cream!"
Food challenges are often a social sort of thing.
From Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest to Man vs. Food to the spicy wing challenge
at your favorite dive bar, anyone taking on a challenge is probably going to be cheered
on.
It turns out that cheering is important — at least, for men.
Researchers from Cornell University conducted a study to see what influence the presence
or absence of a cheering crowd had on competitors' ability to eat.
They found something incredible: Cheering spectators encouraged men to eat more, and
women to eat less.
What's going on here?
When they talked to study participants, they found that women described competitive eating
in front of an audience as making them feel embarrassed and self-conscious, which limited
the amount they were able to eat.
Men, on the other hand, said they were encouraged by the cheers and the idea of performing feats
of gluttony for a crowd, and that made them capable of eating more than they could have
if they weren't in front of an audience.
The right mindset is important.
If you've watched competitive eaters in action, you might notice that many have a tendency
to jump as they're eating.
There's a practical reason for that, says Michelle Lesco.
When you're trying to beat the clock, you're — of course — eating fast.
That can make the food build up where you don't want it to, and jumping helps keep the
food moving down and not backing up in the esophagus.
Matt Stonie has said that standing straight also helped open up the abdominal cavity to
keep things moving in the right direction, because all that food tends to get lodged
in the upper stomach.
Getting it to move downward isn't always easy, and that means a lot of shaking and wiggling
to pack food into the bottom of the stomach.
Are you trying your hand at food challenges while you're sitting on a bench at a restaurant?
You just might be sabotaging yourself, and now you know.
Which seems like it would be the worst kind of challenge?
Eating a huge quantity of food?
Maximum spiciness?
How about dairy challenges, like ice cream and milkshakes?
Let's put it this way: when Adam Richman tried the Crown Candy Kitchen's five milkshake challenge,
it ended poorly.
Very poorly.
In the bathroom.
According to Stanford's Dr. Connor O'Brien, there's a reason milk and dairy challenges
are so bad: lactose.
Dairy challenges essentially overload your ability to digest lactose — even if you're
not lactose intolerant, there's only so much your body can process.
Ingest more than that, and the lactose gets pushed into the colon, the bacteria there
digests it, multiplies, and causes some serious gastrointestinal
distress.
Bottom line?
Drink or eat too much of it, you're going to be in for a world of hurt.
And so is the nearest bathroom.
"Watching people get sick always makes me sick, and, frankly, so does talking about it."
First, the good news.
According to the BBC, there doesn't seem to be much scientific evidence that scarfing
down Carolina Reaper sauce-covered wings during a food challenge is going to do lasting damage,
at least most of the time.
But it will make you think it is, and here's what's going on.
The capsaicin in the hot peppers is triggering pain receptors, and sending
signals to the brain that say you're being burned... even though you're really not.
And as particularly devilish people are developing hotter and hotter peppers, reactions are getting
extreme.
In 2014, two reporters were sent to the hospital after trying to eat the dubiously-named XXX
Hot Chilli Burger, suffering from severe stomach pains.
Then, in 2018, The Guardian reported on the unfortunate side effects that came after one
man ate a Carolina Reaper.
He ended up in the hospital after the pepper triggered a series of something called thunderclap
headaches — which are short bursts of extreme pain.
It was reversible, but his case was also linked to several other cases where hot peppers caused
the narrowing of arteries and ultimately heart attacks.
Many food challenges allow you to drink water while you're trying to finish, and competitive
eaters say it's a valuable tool.
Competitive eater Joey Chestnut has said that he would drink gallons of water in training
and during contests, all to help compact food in his stomach and get it going down faster.
But according to the American Council on Science and Health, that's ridiculously dangerous.
Drinking too much water over a short amount of time — like the time a food challenge
takes — can lead to water intoxication.
It's essentially a condition where there is so much water in the body that levels of other
vital elements — particularly sodium — drop too low, and it can be deadly.
Low sodium is called hyponatremia, and the Mayo Clinic says it's often caused
by drinking too much water, although there can be other causes.
It can lead to confusion, fatigue, muscle weakness and spasms, headaches, vomiting,
seizures, and even coma.
In 2007, a woman named Jennifer Strange was participating in a challenge to see who could
drink the most water without relieving themselves, and after drinking two gallons and coming
in second, she died of water intoxication.
Take a look at a lineup of professional competitive eaters, and you'll notice something surprising:
most of them are very, very thin.
There's actually a practical reason for that, and it doesn't have anything to do with a
need to keep fit when they're not eating thousands upon thousands of calories in a single sitting.
When someone shoves an abnormal amount of food down their throat in a very short amount
of time, it causes the stomach to expand — professional or amateur.
And it needs room to expand.
The heavier the person, the more fat they're carrying in their abdomen.
The expanding stomach needs to push against that fat, and that's going to limit what fits.
A thin person has less fat and more of a chance for their stomach to expand more comfortably,
and that adds up to a bit more space for food.
The physical effects of taking on a massive food challenge don't end with the competition,
either.
According to Women's Health, eaters of all levels can expect some suffering after they
finish, whether they win or have to tap out.
Competitive eater Michelle Lesco says the effects depend on the food.
If it's something salty — like hot dogs — you can expect a day or two of feeling
extremely, uncomfortably bloated.
She also reports being exhausted following competitions, and says the greasy foods will
definitely leave you with a mouthful of grease that can make you feel sicker than the actual
food.
Gastrointestinal distress is also common, and there's a catch: because professional
competitive eaters train with massive amounts of food pretty regularly, they're also training
their bodies to deal more efficiently with the consequences.
And that means the civilian who thinks it's an awesome idea to try a food challenge for
the first time is going to suffer way more than a professional would.
That's food for thought.
Since food challenges are still a relatively new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things,
no one's quite sure what long-term effects they're going to have on the people who regularly
do them.
As Matt Stonie told USA Today,
"A lot of us don't know what we're doing.
We're just experimenting.
Sometimes people go a little gung-ho, a little overboard, and hurt themselves."
Medical experts have speculated about the type of long-lasting damage regular competitive
eaters and food challenge-undertakers can expect to suffer later in life, and it's not
pretty.
Eating disorder expert Kim Dennis went as far as calling it, quote, "self-abuse," and
others have spoken out about the shopping list of troubles it's likely to cause.
That includes a tendency toward morbid obesity, constant nausea and vomiting, gastroparesis,
which happens when the stomach can no longer process food and
empty itself normally, and the need for a gastrectomy, which is the removal of part
or all of the stomach.
It's also worth noting that Major League Eating chair George Shea discourages anyone from
participating in an eating contest without medical professionals present.
Shea warns people not to try this at home, and notes that professional-level events are
kept short for safety reasons.
Makes that amateur pie-eating contest look a little different, doesn't it?
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